The Ethical Pause
+ John Paul Vincent +
Professor of English & Chair of the Division of English
Asbury College
Barbara Pym was a mid-twentieth century British
novelist of English country life, rural manners, and the
quiet ordinariness of the everyday. In the radical 1960s,
her popularity sank dramatically; indeed, for fourteen years
she remained unpublished-the infamous "silent period" from
1963 to 1977. Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin
included her name on a list of underrated writers for the
Times Literary Supplement. "If only somebody," she wrote a
friend, "would have the courage to be unfashionable."1
Perhaps anyone attempting to defend a natural law
theory of ethics in our time will find some of the same
resistance. And, at a time when traditional liberal arts
curricula are being deconstructed or discontinued, the
thought of proposing a natural law orientation for moral
education may seem a wild return to antiquity.
When we think of the students we face in the classroom,
the notion may seem even more untenable. Our students,
first, are American students. Our national literature is
filled with wandering and rootless heroes, people traveling
light, out on the open road, restless, endlessly
experimenting. In the mid-nineteenth century, Tocqueville
described the type: "The American has no time to tie
himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and
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ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels
the need of it; more, he loves it; for the instability
instead of meaning disaster to him seems to give birth only
to miracles about him.2 Music videos hit the charts one
week and disappear the next; songs are introduced one year
and become "golden oldies" or "classics" the next. The
idea, then, that there might be a universal or permanent
human nature seems an unwanted constraint on the freedom of
the young American.
Our students are also modern students. Ralph Turner
has argued that American life has witnessed a change in
recent years from an "institutional" model of selfhood to an
"impulsive" model.3 When the individual is seized by an
expressive outburst of spontaneous emotion, he may find
himself in a quandary. The institutional view of the self
finds the emotion an invasive threat to the "true self"
while the impulsive view interprets the same emotion as a
liberation of the "true self" from artificial constraints.
For the institutional model, the true self is present when
the conscious individual is in complete control; for the
impulsive model, the true self is present when conscious
control is loosened, when inhibitions are relaxed or
abandoned. Linton's findings seem relevant to our focus on
moral education. The typical young person does not want to
be reminded of limits, laws, rules, action-guiding
principles.
Our students, finally, are adolescent students. George
2
Santayana once remarked that "scepticism is the chastity of
the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon
or to the first comer."4 Surely Santayana is right. A
natural skepticism seems characteristic of adolescent life.
It is not our task, it probably should be said at the
outset, to drive young students out of this natural,
protective skepticism into premature commitments.
Nevertheless, at some point the commitments must be made.
Especially in the moral domain, these fundamental
commitments are not some optional emergency kit which might
come in handy some time. G. K. Chesterton always carried a
penknife with him whether he was in the street, on a bus, or
at home in his sitting room. It was the kind of knife, he
said, which could be used to take a stone out of a horse's
hoof. Now Chesterton, of course, didn't own a horse. But
if he ever had the money he might buy one. And if that
horse ever got a stone in its hoof, he was ready with the
knife. A penknife is a potentially useful, though
dispensable, item of personal property. But moral
convictions are an integral part of our humanity, essential
to proper human functioning.
A Time for Reflection
When I arrive at work in the morning, I am almost daily
surprised by the sight of a college secretary sitting in her
car in the parking lot; typically, she is sipping orange
juice from a cardboard carton, and listening to the radio.
My surprise comes from the fact that I don't like to sit in
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my car at any time. Sometimes when I go to the mall, I
arrive early-maybe ten minutes before the stores are
scheduled to open; even then, I get out of my car, walk to
the curb, and do my waiting on foot. When as a college
student I worked in a grinding wheel factory during the
summers, co-workers would often arrive a half hour early and
sit in their vehicles drinking coffee from a thermos, idling
the engine, and reading the morning paper. The whole ritual
mystified me then and it mystifies me now. But I think I am
beginning to understand. That secretary probably begins her
day by rising early, getting dressed, preparing breakfast
for a family, packing lunches, seeing schoolchildren off to
the bus. When she arrives at work, there is mail to open
and sort, a backlog of typing, a phone ringing at irregular
intervals throughout the day. The moment in the parking lot
is an intermission, a time to regain composure and prepare
herself for the routine of the day.
Rollo May speaks of the ethical significance of the
"pause." The ability to pause is a distinctly human
capacity. One breaks the chain of cause and effect and
comes to a full stop. The world becomes available for
reflection. In much the same way, Irving Babbitt used to
speak of the "inner check." Ordinarily, we go with the flow
of temperament. Sometimes, though, on the very brink of
placing an action in the world, we experience a hesitation;
we find ourselves called upon to reconsider our decision,
perhaps to set the proposed act into a larger context.
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Robert Penn Warren uses the metaphor of the "ringmaster
self" to speak of this characteristically human ability.
The self transcends its temperament, its motives, its roles,
its circumstances. Like a ringmaster in a circus, directing
our attention to one ring or another, to the trapeze or to
the lion's cage, the self is able to review its own inner
life and to choose the motives on which it will act. In the
religious life, the term is "recollection." Much of our
life is spent in a "distracted" or "dispersed" state. When
we are watching a sitcom on television, for example, we find
ourselves lulled into a state of passivity as the images and
dialogue roll over us. But when the program is concluded we
rise and take possession of ourselves. We take ourselves
into our own hands. We take ourselves back.
My point has been a long time coming. It is this. A
college education in our day is a four-year pause. In her
book, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, Eva T.H. Brann
describes the college years: "For the student, the
collegiate years are traditionally those between sixteen and
twenty-two, late adolescence and early youth. They seem to
be appointed by man and nature for a special interlude."5
Students come to us at a wonderfully opportune time-for them
and for us.
Natural Law Thinking
In his book Acts of Recovery, Jeffrey Hart describes
author-teachers like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton as
"substitutes for tradition."6 Before modern times,
5
according to Hart, people received a knowledge of religious
and moral matters by a sort of "cultural osmosis." With the
arrival of modernity, humanity has experienced a dramatic
break of cultural continuity. But the good teacher, even a
teacher much less skilled than Lewis or Chesterton, can in a
small way compensate for our impoverished condition by
providing reminders of a long, lost wisdom-the idea, for
example, that morality is rooted in nature and that moral
norms are discoverable by reason-the ancient notion of a
natural law.
The presupposition of natural law thinking is that man
is a created being. He is created by God to be intelligent
and free. When we speak of a "natural law" of human
conduct, we are not speaking of laws like gravitation which
operate without us. A rosebush produces rosebushes
unconsciously and involuntarily. When we speak of a natural
moral law, however, we are speaking of a law requiring a
responsible exercise of human freedom. The law is "natural"
not because it functions automatically but because it is an
expression of our human nature; that is, it requires
intelligence to discover it and freedom to follow it.
Many Protestants prefer to speak of "divine commands"
as the ground and origin of human ethical obligation. Here
the "will of God" becomes central. Certainly, we must agree
that God has issued clear moral directives. But if the
moral life originates in the will of God, in commands issued
to creatures, we have difficulty seeing how those commands
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can avoid a degree of arbitrariness. Why is a creature
obligated to obey such commands? Because God is God?
Because he is, as someone has rather irreverently remarked,
"the biggest bully on the block"? Surely this is a nonmoral
reason even if it carries a certain initial plausibility.
Shouldn't we say, rather, that we feel the obligation to
obey the commands of God not because God is God but because
God is good? But, then, as soon as we say that God is good,
it appears that we already possess the moral equipment to
discern in some measure God's goodness and to make the
judgment that he is good. Could it be that we do not become
moral beings by the receipt of a command, but that we are
already moral beings when the command comes? I am trying to
say that the natural moral law is not the ceiling of our
moral life, but it is the floor.
As Christians, we need to say that everything derives
ultimately from God. He is the Lord of heaven and earth.
He is the supreme lawgiver. He is, moreover, the creator of
all that is natural. St. Thomas distinguished four orders
of law. All of creation is an expression of divine wisdom,
a divinely ordained order. Things are what they are by
virtue of the Eternal Law. Human beings, of course,
participate in the eternal law inasmuch as they are
creatures of God with determinate natures and insofar as
they become aware of the law of their nature (the Natural
Law) as normative for guiding conduct. In addition, God has
explicitly revealed his purposes for human beings through
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divine commands addressed to them in revelation, the Divine
Law. Lastly, human beings have been given the power to form
laws of their own for the regulation of social life: the
Positive Law. A curfew in a dorm and a speed limit for a
highway are examples of man-made laws.
Two Versions of Natural Law Thinking
C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man posits the existence
of a moral tradition containing the collective wisdom of the
human race, a transcultural and transpersonal source of
moral knowledge he labels the Tao. It is Lewis' assumption
that by the exercise of common sense, human beings become
aware of the moral commonplaces of life as self-evident
truths. Presupposed is an underlying attitude toward
reality: "For wise men of old," he says, "the cardinal
problem had been to conform the soul to reality and the
solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue."7
When we adopt this posture, one of humble submission to the
nature of things, we discover objective values in the
creational order by the use of our natural reason. If these
values are embodied and retained in a moral tradition, each
man or woman may find them ready to hand; the need to search
them out for oneself is obviated.
Lewis begins his study with an aesthetic example, the
celebrated waterfall. We are accustomed to describing
waterfalls as beautiful. In calling them beautiful, we are
saying something significant about waterfalls, not merely
indulging a subjective effusion of emotion. Values, in
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other words, are resident in things. Our responses do not
confer value on things; rather, we find value there.
Waterfalls are not beautiful because we have certain
feelings when they are present. No, we have certain
feelings because waterfalls are in fact beautiful. Values,
that is, are objective rather than subjective. Lewis goes
so far as to say that the universe demands certain value
responses. Objects do not merely receive our approval or
esteem; they can be said to merit or require it. To think
unbeautiful what is in fact beautiful is somehow to fail the
universe. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder.
When we move to the moral realm, we find that certain
basic moral axioms (that natural affection is good, that we
should tell the truth, that we should not do injury to
others) are not merely human conventions or sentiments or
hypothetical imperatives but real moral truths. If we want
to maintain our sanity, we cannot do without them. "Unless
you accept these without question as being to the world of
actions what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have
no practical principles whatsoever."8
The direct challenge ("Yes, but how do you know?") is
unanswerable. A self-evident truth cannot be defended by an
appeal to a more basic principle. One can only point to the
truth and hope the other person sees it too.
Last year, our sister institution-Asbury Theological
Seminary-held a holiday potluck for faculty and spouses
during the Christmas season. As he walked along the buffet
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tables, one professor noticed a small slip of paper
protruding from beneath a casserole. The note read: "This
dish is marvelous. Could you send me the recipe?" The
words were followed by the name of a faculty spouse making
the request. For a moment, our professor paused with the
note in hand, then, with a twinkle in his eye, returned the
note to the table-this time sliding it under a small dish of
carrot sticks. This little episode amuses me. I think of
the poor family coming to retrieve the dish of carrots and
their confusion at the note. How absurd to need a recipe .
. . for carrot sticks! Surely we do unnecessarily
complicate some of our moral deliberations; we press for
epistemological precision when we ought simply to do the
decent thing we know to do. On the other hand, those
attempting to develop a moral theology may need to exchange
recipes. That is what this conference is about.
Furthermore, we need to dialogue about ethics because
"self-evident" does not always mean "obvious." To see what
"ought" to be done may involve a great deal of study. Even
"self-evident" truths can be what Josef Pieper calls "steep
truths."
Thomistic natural law theory is a more technical
matter. We will only be able to present the sketchiest
overview here. All human beings, says Thomas, have a
natural desire for God. We are ordained to him; an
orientation to God is in-built-part of our very humanity.
That God is the ultimate end of our being is not naturally
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discerned. But on the natural level this desire manifests
itself in a proximate way as a natural ordination to the
good. All things naturally seek the good. Now the good for
a human being is that which perfects and completes the
person. The true "nature" of a being is that being at its
most accomplished point and in its completed state. Our
natural reason, says Thomas, is able to identify what is
really good for human beings, the objective good for us.
Reason can distinguish between the temperamental self (what
we happen to be at any given time) and the essential self
(what we should be). Reason can distinguish between the
apparent good (what we happen to want) and the real good
(what we should want). Reason can distinguish between the
subjective or psychological good (what we think will please
us) and the objective or ethical good (what will fulfill us
as human beings). The good for human beings is always to
act in accord with this true nature. The evil is to act in
ways that thwart the true self, divert us, shunt us out of
the path of development, flourishing, and perfection. That
which is really good for us is also our duty. As Mortimer
Adler puts it, "We ought to desire everything really good
for us and nothing else."9
Human beings, of course, have an array of natural
inclinations, dispositions, tendencies, drives. A child
possesses a natural curiosity, the embryonic stage of a
later drive toward knowledge. People enjoy companionship, a
manifestation of the nature human drive to enter into
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satisfying social relationships. These natural inclinations
are uniquely human potentials which indicate the direction
human fulfillment will take. Reason, we are saying, is able
to know our nature in its general contours and to dictate
those ways of behaving which will realize or actualize our
nature. Some ways of conducting ourselves are "fitting,"
some are not. Married love will contribute to our final
fulfillment, rape will not. When a human being acts in ways
consistent with her essential nature, she finds herself in a
state of well-being, happiness, fulfillment. All of this is
premised on the assumption that a human being's nature is
given. We cannot choose our natures or change them. We
cannot choose what values will make for our fulfillment. We
can, however, choose to seek those things which are really
good for us and to avoid those things which have a
superficial appeal but are only apparent goods-temporary
wants stimulated by the popular press or generated by peer
pressure.
From this perspective, we can legitimately speak of a
human duty to be happy. A utilitarian or self-realization
theory of the psychological type defines our happiness
subjectively and egoistically. Thomas, however, sees
happiness as consisting in the fulfillment of what man was
meant to be in the nature of things. The end of man is
given by God in creation. The conditions that make for
happiness have been established by God. But we can know
them, cooperate freely with them, and by so doing conform
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our lives to the created order as designed by our Maker.
Does this approach to ethics ignore the fact that we
are fallen creatures? Not at all. Good ethics cannot save
a soul. Only the blood of the cross of Jesus Christ can
cure the deep heart problem of modern man. Only faith in
Our Lord's atoning sacrifice can bring the forgiveness and
cleansing we need. When we find Christ, we learn that he is
just what we needed all along. He is the home of the soul.
As we walk with him, by grace he enlarges our hearts to
contain the supernatural happiness he wants us to possess.
But even in our fallen condition, before the intervention of
salvific grace, we human beings are moral creatures. As
Bruno Schuller has put it, "The believer can only hear and
understand the message of Christ because he understands and
expresses himself as a moral being prior to God's word of
revelation."10 Though a fully developed Christian ethic
will transcend any natural morality, even a fallen creature
can decide to do good rather than evil. St. Augustine says
that "The natural law is written in the hearts of men which
iniquity itself effaces not."
We should also say that our natural experience is
revelatory of moral truth. R. Eric O'Connor, for example,
tells how he learned the value of truthfulness: "I learned
what truthfulness was by being believed when I was a young
boy telling a lie. I was believed so clearly and the man
believing me was a teacher. . . . And he took it so simply
that I've found it very hard to lie ever since."11 Our
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natural experience of being believed, even in a "fib,"
instructs us that truthtelling is "natural" to human
relationships and to all healthy social intercourse. Those
to whom we speak expect us to tell the truth; indeed, they
look in our eyes and study our faces without suspicion or
doubt. Human interaction, even with strangers, begins with
a buoyant sense of good will and the inevitable throb of
gratuitous trust. Even when we have been hurt, betrayed,
disappointed again and again, we tend, however hesitantly,
to hope that "this time" our newfound friend will turn out
to be reliable and true. This dynamic is quite simply an
in-built feature of creation so familiar as to be instantly
recognizable by all. In like manner, our discontent in an
atmosphere of deceit and betrayal ("Don't trust anybody") is
more than a utilitarian judgment or an expression of
preference. It is an assurance that our God has not left
Himself without a witness in the moral dimension of life.
Exodus 20:16 is a biblical reformulation of an insight so
stubbornly persistent as to be nearly unavoidable in natural
experience. The natural law, I mean to say, may not be the
alpha and omega of human ethical life. But it is the alpha.
Advantages of a Natural Law Ethic
1. Natural law theory makes morality natural to us.
Morality is not something imposed upon our true natures. It
is not something alien which comes from outside and subdues
and coerces. When we live in accord with the dictates of
the natural law, we are aligning ourselves with the divinely
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designed order for human life.
2. A natural law ethic allows us to dialogue with
non-Christians. When Muddy Waters used to play his sweet
blues numbers at Mississippi juke houses, his motto was
"there wasn't no such thing as you couldn't get in." The
natural law includes all humanity regardless of individual,
cultural, religious differences. The norms of morality are
available because of our shared human nature. Carl Braaten
has recently argued that natural law philosophy may serve as
an "apologetic bridge"12 between the Christian and the
non-Christian.
3. The natural law notion restores to us a truly
Christian conception of creativity. Contemporary man finds
himself burdened with an inflated sense of his own radically
undetermined will and its capacity for original creation.
C.S. Lewis, certainly no enemy to spontaneity, freedom,
creativity, counters with the corrective that "the human
mind has no more power of inventing a new value that of
imagining a new primary color, or, indeed, of creating a new
sun and a new sky for it to move in."13 Ethical life begins
when the individual decides to abandon the attempt to define
or create himself; when, instead, he agrees to conform
himself to the natural law, to seek those things which are
objectively good for him. But God wants us to be creative.
The stern moralist may insist that it is better to be good
than to be original, but God encourages human creative
experiment. "The moral ideal," says Ralph McInerny, "is
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open to an infinity of realizations."14 We must be honest,
that is, but there are a thousand ways to be honest. "If
the universal end is rightly understood," says John Wild,
"it leaves an infinite variety of different ways by which it
may be realized in divergent circumstances."15 The natural
law dictates that we tell the truth, but there are many
truths to tell.
4. The natural law tradition returns us to a more
holistic theological position. For one thing, it puts
creation in focus. Modern man doesn't take the fall of man
seriously enough. But it is possible so to emphasize our
noetic incapacity that we no longer see human beings as
capable of discerning the fundamental structures of God's
world. Surely this is an error. If basic morality is a
divine mystery, the unbeliever is excluded from even the
most primitive levels of moral awareness. Dialogue with
non-Christians will come to seem impossible for the believer
and rational persuasion futile without some common ground.
Then, the only recourse will be to leave the marketplace of
ideas and to enter the political arena of power relations
and ideological self-promotion.
But all human beings do find moral truth in the
creation. They can follow after that truth and they do.
Ethics will not save anyone's soul. Were we to follow the
natural law to perfection, we would no more merit salvation
that the most unrepentant sinner. As I say, it is the floor
and not the ceiling. My point is that as redeemed persons
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we should rejoice that we have the ceiling over our heads.
But without the floor we have no place to stand.
Notes
1Barbara Pym, as cited by Joseph Epstein, Partial
Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1989), p. 130.
2Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America. I have
been unable to locate the chapter from which this was taken.
3Ralph H. Turner, "The Real Self: From Institution to
Impulse," American Journal of Sociology 81 (1976): 989-1016.
4George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith, as
cited in John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography (New
York: Paragon House, 1988), p. 253.
5Eva Brann, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p.19.
6Jeffrey Hart, Acts of Recovery (Hanover, New
Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1989), p.113.
7C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: MacMillan,
1986), p.88.
8Ibid., pp. 52-53.
9Mortimer Adler, Desires Right and Wrong: The Ethics
of Enough (New York: Maxwell, 1991), p. 33.
10Bruno Schuller, "Can Moral Theology Ignore Natural
Law?" Theology Digest 15 (1967): p. 96.
11R. Eric O'Connor, as cited by George Anastaplo,
"Liberation Pedagogy: R. Eric O'Connor and the Thomas More
Institute," Cross Currents 39 (Winter 1989-90): 468.
12Carl Braaten, "Protestants and Natural Law," First
Things 19 (January 1992): 21.
13C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pp. 56-57.
14Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral
Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Washington: Catholic
University of America, 1982), p. 33.
15John Wild's writings on ethics are models of clarity.
See, for example, "Natural Law and Modern Ethical Theory,"
Ethics 62 (October 1952) and Introduction to Realistic
Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1948).
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